Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cerenti.

These days, so much of our lives take place online. But what about our afterlives? A recent study by the Oxford Internet Institute predicts that the number of deceased Facebook users could outnumber the living by 2070. As AI advances, a debate is growing over digital remains and what should be done with the vast amounts of data we leave behind.

In this episode, Carl Oman, author of The Afterlife of Data, explores the ethics, politics and futures of our digital identities. Oman is an assistant professor of political science at Uppsala University Sweden, and his work spans several topics including the politics and ethics of AI, deepfakes and digital remains.

Today he is joined in conversation by researcher and broadcaster Stephanie Hare to shed light on who truly owns our data after death and whether we should have a say in our digital legacy. Let's join Stephanie now with more.

Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Stephanie Hare. Our guest today is Carl Ullmann. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Carl. So I'm desperate to hear a little bit about your research background and how this led to the book that you wrote that we're about to discuss.

So I often describe myself as a kind of disciplinary orphan in academia. I started out in comparative literature, and then I did a second, like a double major degree in sociology. And then I came to the UK, and I started studying at Oxford at a place called the Oxford Internet Institute, which is this interdisciplinary environment where people from

all around academia come together to study the internet. So the degree I got for my master's is literally called Master of the Social Science of the Internet, Shortan Master of the Internet.

And then my PhD was in information communication and the social sciences. So interdisciplinary studies of the internet and digital technology, that would be my background. And when did you get interested in death? To go right into the awkward, you know, death is something that particularly given your time here in the UK, you will notice that we avoid talking about it as much as possible. It's awkward, it makes people feel uncomfortable, we really put it away.

You go right to the heart of the matter. So how did you get interested in this? Surprisingly, perhaps, from comparative literature. When I was a literature student, I heard about, and this is back in like 2014, I heard about these AI applications where you could feed an entire corpus of texts and

into this algorithm, and it would start reproducing text in the same style as the author. So you could hypothetically take all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels, and you would run them through the machine, and it would spit out another Dostoevsky novel. And that got me really interested in what would be the relationship between that new novel and what Dostoevsky produced during his life. And

That, coupled with when I started studying the internet during my master's, I realized that, oh, hang on, this is not only possible for art and literature. What if there was an entire digital footprint of a person? Could this be done also with your social media data, with your search data, with every kind of digital trace that you're producing? So I became interested in what would be the relationship between

a person and the data that they leave behind upon death. So I wish I had a more personal answer of like, "Oh, someone close to me died and that made me realize so and so." But I really came at this from a philosophical angle. It poked my interest as a scholar. And then I realized that, oh, there are so many layers to this. It's not only the ethics and the philosophy, but

it's also the political economy of this entire phenomenon. Who owns that data and who decides what's going to happen to it and so on. I mean, I'm relieved that this wasn't inspired by some terrible tragedy close to you. It comes from a more philosophical and scholarly bent. And I think one of the things that your book prompted for me, I mean, so many questions, like where to even start, was I was thinking that weirdly Elon Musk was warning just a couple of weeks ago that we're running out of data.

There's this whole myth or argument rather in AI that we're running out of data and what is the answer to that? Is it synthetic data? Is that even true? And as an historian I was like, what is he talking about? There's all sorts of data that has not even been catalogued and structured properly, much less being used. There's data all over the world. We have not even begun to mine all the sources. If you spend time in an archive you also know this.

And then your book made me take it to the next level of, okay, there's actually all the data of everyone who's ever existed on Earth that we have. There's a bunch of people who obviously have existed on Earth that we don't have the data for, but there's a bunch of people who've left their traces behind. And then what you were thinking about in your book of the future, that we can actually start to organize data from now going forward to build out a more sort of responsible, ethical, legal, mindful way of thinking about

the data of the future dead? You know, I mean, you and I are having this conversation now in 2025. So imagine that we fast forward to 100 years from now, between now and then, how many people will have died and left a huge digital footprint? It sounds like, oh, wow, the data is limitless. But at the same time, it isn't structured properly. So like, is it useful? So I wanted to just kind of tease that out with you a bit to think, how did you go from thinking about

That question of do we have enough data? What does it mean to think about the corpus of data, the corpus of work and text to the corpse of human bodies, our physical data, but also our digital remains that we leave all over the Internet? So one of the first things I realized when I started researching this topic for my PhD was this myth of...

the eternity of the internet. We tend to think about the internet as this kind of ephemeral space, this almost like immaterial space beyond the world, where you can just dump data and it will just stay there somehow magically.

And it's even to the extent like when the book was about to be released, the marketing team from my publisher suggested that the title would be Forever Online. And I was like, but my point is that nothing is forever online. It's only going to be there so long as somebody is paying for it. So when we get to the question of do we have enough data? Well, what kind of data would be my follow up question? Because we are deleting data.

heaps of data every day, we produce far, far more data than we can possibly manage. And this is only growing. So sooner or later, someone's data is going to have to be deleted. And I think an illustrating case here is Facebook. So I led a study in 2019 on where we predicted

Based on really good data, the number of dead profiles on Facebook or how many profiles in each year of the 21st century are going to belong to dead people on Facebook. And it turns out that somewhere around the mid to late 2060s or 70s, it's a fair chance that there are going to be more dead than alive users on Facebook.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters because the entire business model of the platform is based on users clicking on ads. But dead people don't click on any ads. They are not consumers. Nevertheless, they take up a lot of server space and those data centers are going to have to be managed. To be clear, the problem here is actually not storage. Storage is cheap. The problem is accessibility.

of keeping the file formats updated and making sure that it's updated with the latest hardware and so on. And in facing that question of, okay, so what do we do with these billions of accounts that are just laying around here and not really being economically productive? Facebook is going to have to face the question,

which accounts do we delete? Which profiles do we not consider to be worthy of preserving for posterity? And for a for-profit company, of course, the answer to that question is, which data can we make money on? So when we talk about, do we have enough data? How are these data going to accumulate over the 21st century? It's all about

what a handful of companies are going to find worthwhile preserving for posterity. And there's something very interesting in what you said there, like the fragility of the internet. Many of us who are of a certain age may have been online in the late 90s or even early 2000s, and the sites that we were on as young people are gone. And everybody knows what that's like, where all of a sudden a photo-sharing site that maybe you used for your art or whatever is gone.

is down i have a personal website and you're right if i don't pay to keep that going it will just disappear i mean i guess there's things like the way back machine we could talk about that as well but it it's surprising how you know skype is about to disappear like we forget that these companies these companies are not like laws of physics there are things that could come and go uh it frequently will um by contrast when we think of things that many humans have left behind you can look at

archaeology, you can go to any museum or go to many sites around the world and those physical objects, many of them still exist. And that made me wonder about, you know,

what are future historians and social scientists going to be able to learn about our time, specifically because of what you just said, that stuff disappears, but also things are not necessarily translated into the latest format. You might have had vinyl records and you moved to CDs and tapes, and now you're on Spotify. But when Spotify goes, you know what I mean? We're using stuff that we think is really convenient and flexible and it exists in the ether,

but it could also just all disappear. So what does that mean for future historians and social scientists who want to understand us now in this moment that we're living in? So, I mean, that's a question with many answers, but it's a real thing that archivists are talking about what they call a digital dark ages.

where we think about digital information as being so secure, as you're pointing out. But the hard truth is that in only a couple of decades from now, if we continue this very short-sighted style of data management, it's not unlikely that we'll actually, or that that generation will actually be quite oblivious about their digital past.

I think that is true, but there are even more scary aspects of that. My biggest fear is not necessarily that we will

lose historical archives, but rather that these archives will be dominated by a handful of tech giants who are going to use them for economic but also political gain. So one of the examples that I bring up in the book where I talk about this privatization of our collective digital past through our digital remains is former Twitter, now X,

And the Me Too campaign. So the Me Too movement was arguably one of the most important events of early 21st century, especially when it comes to women's rights. And it's a global movement with millions of testimonies from women all around the world.

Now, of course, future historians are going to want to study what happened. How did it spread? What kind of testimonies? What were people witnessing it about? Now, that access to this very important part of our history...

is going to be gate kept by one individual and that individual is Elon Musk. So Elon Musk is going to decide in the future who gets to study our collective digital past. And that's a very like even if Elon Musk was a saint, which he is not, that would have been a very scary and unstable development. And I'm using the Me Too movement as an example here. But

any major event from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement to, you know, I could keep listing these really important events. The history about these events is privately owned by the Zuckerbergs and the Musks of the world. And that's a very dangerous development because they are going to use it and they are going to restrain the kinds of usage of that data.

It reminds me also of YouTube taking down videos of human rights violations in certain areas of the world where there's massive conflict because it was violating their terms and conditions. People were saying, "We're uploading these, we're bearing testimony to human rights abuses and war crimes and genocide." And these could actually be admitted in a court of law to hold people to account. But you're taking them down and realizing that what you're talking about, the dominance of certain tech platforms,

the lack of competition, really viable competition in this space, and what it means to be resilient in this day and age about our data. So you maybe don't want to have it all with

you know, the magnificent seven, you know, the American tech giants. Are you going to want it with the Chinese tech giant? Probably not. They're even worse on censorship, right? So like, where is this third space? Is everybody having to have their own sub stack or their, you know, again, American company, their own personal websites? Is that a scalable model?

for this? Should it be the state? Like, should it be a certain country's government that does it? But then governments, particularly liberal democracies, can elect authoritarians who decide to get rid of stuff anyhow, as is happening in the United States, where we're deleting data sets massively, right, that were public. So as you're thinking about that and watching it, are you seeing any paths forward to safeguard data and make us more resilient?

So, I mean, there are plenty of promising solutions. Tim Berners-Lee, who, well, basically invented what we understand to be the internet, but the World Wide Web, is working on some really interesting solutions that lets individuals be in control of their data to a completely different extent than they are today. And I'm all for these kinds of solutions, and they're good, and they're

worthy, but they are not the full answer. And they're especially not the answer when it comes to the accumulated digital past and our digital remains. But there's any solution that gives the individual the power over their own data. Sure, that's great, but there are already hundreds of millions of dead internet users.

What about them? And even if you're trying to get one of these savvy tech solutions where you own your own data through fiduciaries and so on,

Even if you manage to get, let's say, a huge percentage of the population of the Internet to adopt those, let's say even 20%, that's nothing on a global scale. I mean, nothing. And it will certainly not do much for the accumulation of data.

digital remains. So whatever solution we settle upon for the management of our digital past is going to have to be a collective solution. We're going to have to say, okay, these are the principles by which the data of the dead are safeguarded. These are the kinds of organizations and the principles that we think are good for the management of the digital past.

And I'm not, in the book, I'm not promoting any single solution to that. I'm not saying that there should be state ownership. I'm not saying that this or that UN body or organization is going to assume control over the digital past, but rather that we need a plurality of principles and organizations to manage our digital past. And a good comparison here would be information about World War II.

So where is the information about World War II? It's everywhere. Thousands of museums and archives and records and photos spread everywhere. So there's no single actor who can control the narrative of that event or series of events.

Whereas when it comes to events that are taking place today, it's almost the opposite. Sure, they can be journalists and media reportings about something that happened, but that is nothing compared to hundreds of thousands of text messages or geo data from phones or having direct access to exactly what kind of news an entire population were consuming at a certain event and so on. So

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This made me think, first of all, who is this book for? Are you writing this as an alarm? You know, to say this is a problem that you've spotted and you would like certain people to have this on their radar and start thinking about it? Do you want the public to be thinking about it, policymakers? Because I read it with great interest and I thought, you know, you're sketching out the problem and you're doing that so articulately here. Who would be your ideal readership and what change are you hoping to see?

The book is intended to be read really by anyone who has an interest in these questions. I think it's by my former mentor, Luciano Floridi, who provided one of the blurbs on the backside saying that it will be of interest to any mortal with a digital presence, which is like anyone. But it's

It's a call for people to consider what happens to their data when they die, not solely as consumers, but as citizens.

So, I commonly get this question from journalists like, "Okay, so what can our listeners do to protect their digital legacy?" And of course, I have advice for that and that's also in the book. But I think my most important advice is to say that try to think of this question not only as a matter of your individual privacy, but rather as a citizen leaving a certain kind of society behind.

So when you leave your data behind upon death and you may say, like, I don't care what happens to it. Like, I'm going to be dead anyway. So who cares if someone goes through my WhatsApp messages or my search history or whatever?

Sure, but you may care about the society that you leave behind. And if you don't do anything about your digital legacy, you're basically giving a present, a free present to Musk and Zuckerberg, provided you're using one of their platforms or to Google or whichever company owns your data.

And that is a question that will have massive impact on your peers and potentially even on your immediate family. So one of the examples that I'm drawing on in the book is bio data. Tens of millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, have uploaded their DNA to ancestry sites for genealogy research.

And it's fun doing that. And you're like, oh, it turns out I'm like 7% Irish. But the thing is, when you die, you will have zero rights over these data and you have no way to control where they go and what happens to them. And you may trust the company. Let's say that you uploaded your stuff to 23andMe or something like that.

But guess what? That company won't be around forever either. And what's going to happen when they go bust? Well, the same thing that happens when every company goes out of business, their assets are going to be auctioned out to the highest bidder, which means that

Your data, both your social data, but also your genomic data, may be auctioned out to the highest bidder who can do whatever they want with that data, by the way, because you're dead, so you don't have any data privacy rights. And that can, of course, be used to...

draw inferences about your immediate family, because that company may not have any information about them. But if they own their dead parents and siblings and so on, all of a sudden that can be used to make predictions about their health or what their credit score is.

So you may not care about what happens to your data, but you should care about the society you live in and your immediate family and next of kin. That was something that brought me up short while reading your book is, you know, the dead have no privacy rights. And I was like, my God, that's hardcore. And I didn't know that. And I thought, is that something that you'd like to see changed? First of all, like, is one of the outcomes that you might hope from this book is like,

a bunch of lawmakers read it and are like, my God, we've got to close this loophole. Let's actually pass some laws. We have regulation on the books saying, yeah, you might have donated your donate or given your data to 23andMe. And if they go out of business, like they can't sell that data on, like it gets destroyed. And it also made me think,

I don't know if it's good to put the onus on all of us individuals that we have to go around and delete all of the data or have a digital will in place for everything that we've ever had online, or if it should actually be on the onus of anyone who's storing people's data. This is maybe a use for AI if that data account becomes inactive over a period of time or if you're able to upload when somebody dies to a register that then goes out, everyone, Internet, this human being has left the Earth.

and everybody's got to nuke their data. Because I wouldn't even know where to start in nuking my data. And I'm one of these people that would love to leave no trace. Like, I don't care about being part of the collective vibe. Like, my work is my legacy, but my personal data, I would love that just to be gone. But I thought, you know, how would I do that? And also, how do I check that they've done it? I deleted my Facebook account back in 2016 after they were selling data and being really naughty with Cambridge Analytica. Yeah.

They say that they've deleted it, but I can't audit that. I don't know. You know, so I was thinking, I was thinking as I was reading your book, do you want this to be something that all of us have to add to our personal to-do list? Like come up with a will and figure out all this stuff, which, you know, we know is not going to happen, frankly, even if people could do it. I think that just, that's a big friction point. Or do you want to see a legal requirement that

out there for organizations to do it. I certainly want to see more legal requirements. I think that like in the GDPR, the GDPR explicitly states that your data protection rights cease upon death. And I think that it would be a good thing to include dead people, like not to grant dead people the exact same kinds of rights that the living are granted through the GDPR, but

analog rights, at least, you know, some basic level of protection. Like for me, it's crazy that like if a company goes bust, even if they have hundreds of thousands or millions of dead people on their servers, they can do whatever they want with it. And I'm like, how is that possible? And I often get that question from when I do media, people are like, but why? Like, why don't the dead have any data privacy rights? And

My answer is that, well, the dead don't have very strong lobbying groups in Brussels.

And also everybody's so uncomfortable talking about death, you know, most people... How many people walking around, they don't even have a will for themselves, much less they're thinking about, "How could my data be used? Does Mark Zuckerberg want to turn me into a slave on one of his metaverse farms in 20 years time?" Or every woman that's on the internet could just become an object of deep fake porn after their death because there's literally no right, not that we have any rights now, by the way, to take that stuff down while we're alive, but there really would be no leg to stand on, so to speak.

you're taking dead women's profiles who's gonna fight for that you know it's so gross so i i loved your book for this because i was like he's going there he's going to like he's making us all go to the place that most of us don't want to think about we're in a bit of denial

lawmakers don't want to because there's no voting rights in it, right? It's kind of, everybody, I could just see business and be like, oh, this is like another cost for us. But you talk about this in such a fascinating way. And it made me really think about also the role of archivists and librarians and people who over time have had to, you know, they're constantly having to A, organize this ever-expanding corpus of

if you will, of information and keep up with all the formatting changes, etc. Talk to me about the role of these unsung heroes who keep our knowledge stewarded and accessible for all of us. Can we draw on their expertise to help us out here? I think your question highlights an interesting point about the entire tech discourse.

Which is that it's either very short-term focused, it's about what's going to be the next blockchain breakthrough, or what's AI going to be doing in five years, or it's absurdly long-term. It's like, but what if AI in 100 years destroys humanity? But the questions that are two or three decades ahead of us tend to be forgotten.

And I think there are two reasons for that. The one is that the industry is not interested in things happening two or three decades from now because it's vain to do any kind of investments that long term. And policymakers aren't really interested either because politics runs on a four or five year cycle.

where you want to be re-elected, so you're going to have to deliver results on a short horizon. It's not like we're saying, "Oh, I'm going to vote for this party because they made some really good choices 25 years ago that have paid off now." So both the industry and politics run some of these very short-term cycles.

Whereas librarians and archivists, they're concerned with the long term. And there are really good things happening from that community. There's, of course, the Internet Archive, who are doing a very, very important job. The Wikimedia Foundation, who are doing an amazing job in just preserving

preserving human knowledge and expanding it to more and more languages. UNESCO has a number of really interesting initiatives on software heritage and trying to preserve software for the future. But these are on the fringes. They're not really part of

the bigger battles about the really, really valuable data, the personal data, the stuff that connects the private with the collective and the political. So it's almost like we've surrendered the parts that tell the really interesting history about the past, probably because there are really difficult lines of conflict here.

So sure, we all recognize that an archive like Facebook has a massive historical value. Of course, imagine if we would have had access to that granularity of data on, say, Germany in the 30s.

like the historical insights would have been massive. Or if we could have read the WhatsApp messages from Napoleon and his conversations with his private conversations with the officers the nights the night before battle. I mean, that's

That would have been an amazing, both on a collective level and individual level, an amazing historical asset. And it's not like that asset doesn't exist. And we realize that there are conflicts here between the privacy of the dead and the historical value. But I don't think that is a sufficient reason to just completely capitulate these questions to big tech.

It's almost like, you know, oh, as long as the state doesn't do it, it's fine. And we have a good and healthy precaution for state dominance when it comes to control of the past. We've all read George Orwell's 1984, and we know that whoever controls the past controls the future and so forth. But when this discourse was born, it's as if we couldn't imagine

a bigger data controller than a state where like a state is like the peak of a data controller. But now it's a different kind of organization that we've got to

keep an eye out for it, which is not states, but multinational tech corporations who vastly outsize states when it comes to data control. But we're still very focused on like, oh, let's make sure that the state doesn't have too much data about its citizens. Let's outsource that to some companies that...

that do not have our best interests in mind, nor any long-term incentives to do the right things. And to take a counter argument to everything we've just been discussing, because there's a part in your book, it's on page 123 for those who would like to follow along, you actually raised the idea that it could potentially be more advantageous, and I wondered if it might be even more ethical, to do research on the dead,

than people who are alive. So when you're doing your market trends, you're trying to understand public health questions, you know, why do people take vaccines or not, for example, during the pandemic? I mean, you can imagine the pandemic research that's going to need to be done as we prepare for the next one, etc. It made me think about what we already have as researchers with ethical constraints, people being comfortable, etc.,

Is there a way of flipping this entire problem on its head and going, actually there's an ethical advantage

to using the dead as a dedicated data set. And I don't know if that would need to be at the national level. So like here in the United Kingdom we have the National Health Service. That's a massive, massive potential data set. Again it's not joined up nearly enough to fulfill that potential now but it could be. It could be made that way. And you could then also match that with all the historical data of everybody who's been in the UK that we know whatever we have so far and build it forward with that in mind.

That would be an incredible advantage for the United Kingdom. That's one way of doing it on a national level. You're right, we could also even take that up to a UN level or a World Health Organization level, etc.,

Can you see any way that there's an ethical advantage to doing research on the dead in this way? Oh, certainly. Like I can see many ethical advantages on that. And I think that we even there's even an ethical imperative to study the past and learn from the past. And I think that previous generations have.

should allow for that kind of research on their digital footprints. But we must recognize that there are multiple forms of value at play here. There's of course the economic values that could come out of that. Sure, you could build better AI models based on the data of the dead. You can do different kinds of market research and so on. You can do medical research on it.

but it also has a cultural value. So, like, to give you an example, economically, North American users are way, way more valuable than, say, African users who only...

Economically. So economically, they're much, much more valuable. So from a pure economic perspective, it makes sense to preserve the digital heritage of North America and Europe, but basically just to destroy the African and South Asian data.

But culturally and ethically, we realize that we can't really do that because there's a value, cultural value in diversity of our digital heritage. And then you can add on like other layers on top of it's not just the cultural and the economic. It may also have, say, ethical values of saying, well, that particular culture is very touchy about like posthumous values.

post-humanist data rights, and there may be spiritual aspects to this as well.

So what I'm pointing to in the book is that it's, and I keep returning to this word, that we need a plurality of perspectives and a plurality of values need to be taken into account when we manage the data of the dead. Because there is an onus, of course, to study the dead and to, as you say, to gain those advantages from studying the past data.

But that's not the only thing involved because it's also the privacy of those individuals. It is also the privacy of the individuals who are the descendants of those people. So many, many layers, much more than I can disentangle in one single book. And that's also, I think, the core message of the book. When I came to the final chapter and my editor was like, "Well, you need a solution." Like, okay, so what's the solution?

And in the book, I mean, in every chapter, I'm pointing to how the question of posthumous data management is so intimately entangled with the logic of capitalism, of big tech, with ancient cultural customs and so on. And I'm like, I told my editor, but I can't write a chapter that solves capitalism, right?

And she was like, well, that would make it a very popular book if you pull it off. I mean, yeah. But the approach I went for was kind of doing the opposite. I'm trying to show that...

When people hear about my research topic, when they think about digital remains and the data that we leave behind upon death, they're like, oh, that's such a niche topic. How interesting. And what I'm trying to show in the book is that it's not a niche topic. It happens to everyone, but it's also so entangled with the biggest questions of our time. It's about...

data rights. It's about the power of capital. It's about capitalism. It's about culture. So it's really all of these huge questions that are all crammed down into this tiny question of what do we do with the data of the dead? Yeah. It's funny because you and I have both had

in our lives where we have been at the University of Oxford. And I was just noticing that the Bodleian Library, the head of the Bodleian Library, is doing a partnership with OpenAI. And that's going to be very controversial and very interesting, I think, to watch as researchers. But it made me think about the role of libraries and that maybe we don't have to entirely reinvent the wheel here because what is a system where...

Research outputs are stored in multiple locations across the planet, accessible to all, often for free, sponsored both by government and, like, the private sector, you know, paid for by taxes, with trained researchers as well as trained professionals curating and stewarding it. It was like, we've already invented this. Is there a space for the kind of project you're thinking about to be held in one of the most trusted institutions that exists on the planet, which is libraries? Yeah.

And they could be university libraries, they could be national libraries, etc. There was just something really beautiful about the way I thought your book kind of came full circle. You're starting out your journey as a researcher, you do this time at the Oxford Internet Institute. And then this announcement that's just happened with the Bodleian Library and Oxford and OpenAI, which is obviously...

not a neutral actor in this, but is clearly interested in these types of research partnerships and made me wonder if other AI companies might be thinking about it too, or governments and universities might be thinking, how are we going to

Basically, we're going to have to build a new architecture in some way to take account of this. And I loved it because also at first I read your book and was like, oh my God, he's right. There's going to be more people dead on Facebook or dead on the internet than alive. And I thought, well, why is that freaking me out? Because I'm on planet Earth where more people have been dead than are alive on it, right? Is that so troubling to...

And that's what I kind of loved about it. We tend to think about the emergence of the dead online as an anomaly. We're like, hang on a minute, this is really weird. What are the dead doing here? And as I say in the concluding chapter, it's really the other way around. The internet is one big archive, and the archives were built for the dead. So the newcomers here, the anomalies...

That's us, the living. It is we who have moved into a space that was originally built for the dead. And now that like...

we realize that archives are actually for the dead and that they start to emerge in this space, we're like, "What? That's super weird." And I'm trying to flip that narrative around and say, "No, it's weird that we have started living in an archive." I mean, I think if that was your goal, you succeeded brilliantly. And I can't thank you enough. I started this book on an airplane thinking, "Okay, like going in scholarly book." And I was absolutely just paging through it. It's extremely readable.

It makes you think a lot. And I think that this is something that if it isn't a direct call to action, you know, for problem A needs solution B, I think what you've done is you've certainly put it on the radar as this is a thing we need to think about. If only for people who are capitalistically mined to be like, how do I want to design the data set of the future so it's actionable, storageable, but also for people who have less capitalist interests in mind.

be it privacy concerns, research concerns, or people who've literally been in this industry, they're part of a tradition, going back millennia. There's always been a group of humans who've tried to steward knowledge, keep it going during the Dark Ages, constantly be updating it and fighting to keep it accessible. So I think you've put something really new out there, and I cannot wait to see the reception for it. So thank you so much for writing it. Thank you.

That was Carl Oman, author of The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care, which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. I'm Stephanie Hare. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Cirenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.